Reggie Chrishon says after his favorite gay bar closed 20 years ago, he prayed — literally prayed — to one day walk back into that familiar welcoming place at 107 West 4th Street in Downtown LA.
The Alabama native moved to Southern California more than 30 years ago. Back then, Chrishon was closeted, and happened upon the watering hole by accident.
“I was wrestling with my desire in men,” Chrishon explains. “Because [of] my Christian upbringing, I was told it was not the right thing to do, but I was doing it anyway on the side.”
Score was the first gay bar Chrishon ever stepped foot into: “I used to pass by this area across the street, and you’d call Score a gentleman's club. So I thought it was a strip club. I did not think it was a gay bar.”
He continues, “The place would be packed, but as soon as I walked in and heard the Latin music and the crowd, I felt like I was at home.”
This winter, Crishon’s prayers for that homey place on this familiar street were answered.
Kiso, Downtown LA’s newest gay bar, opened in December as part of a renaissance of queer spaces in the urban core. It’s the brainchild of Downtown LA locals — former Redline owner Oliver Alpuche and bartender Brad Nitz.
Kiso joins other Downtown queer-oriented bars, including the New Jalisco Bar, Precinct, and Bar Franca. All of them are within stumbling distance of one another.
“I think the trifecta is making sure that you have at least three places to go within a night, right?” Alpuche says about the bar’s location in the Historic Core. “When I look at the successful queer cities or areas within the city, we do love to hop around, meet new people, see what the crowds are.”
In inhabiting Score’s old space, Kiso is carrying on the legacy of a business once known as Downtown LA’s oldest gay bar.
In its heyday back in the 1980s and 1990s, Score attracted patrons from all corners of LA, says Lucas Hilderbrand, historian and author of The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After.
“It had the intersection of a working-class queer clientele, a Latinx clientele, and an artist clientele,” Hilderbrand says. “It was a bar that served populations, and intersections of populations, Downtown that really were not part of the visible community and other parts of the city.”
Chrishon recalls how all that diversity played out when it came to who had control of the jukebox.
“One group wanted to play Latin music. Another group wanted to play disco. And so they’d try to outpay the jukebox so that they can hear their music.”
Chrishon continues, “One time, the manager … got so fed up. He just turned it off. He unplugged the jukebox. He said, ‘That’s enough of that.’”
Score was a casualty of the later waves of gentrification in Downtown LA in the 2000s, Hilderbrand says, but he isn’t surprised Kiso moved into its old space. This is part of the cyclical nature queer spaces go through: “There's this cycle of life Downtown where queer nightlife, particularly queer Latinx Downtown nightlife, keeps renewing itself. And so the names, the spaces may change. But there's this constant revolution that, in some ways, circles back to what we were doing before.”
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